by Unknown
“It will be the Soviet Union alone, alone, which will conquer Germany, all of Germany, and make it a faithful subordinate of the socialist camp. The rest of Europe will fall to us like rotten fruit. When the war ends, Soviet power will be planted from Norway to Gibraltar to Crete!”7
Rommel at the Front
Rommel’s Junkers transport was more of a sieve than an aircraft when it belly-landed on the muddy field. His Luftwaffe escort had been jumped by a flock of Stalin’s Red Falcons as they approached the front. The Yak-3s were aggressive and outnumbered the Focke-Wulfs three-to-one. One after another had sought out the Ju-52, clawing past the Focke-Wulfs and sending streams of shells into the transport, burning out one motor, killing the pilot and wounding his copilot who barely got it on the ground without crashing.8
Rommel stumbled out followed by Gehlen, his intelligence chief, and the other survivors. They had landed near a Panzer company retreating west. A Kubelwagen sped over to the plane. A rumpled captain, Knight’s Cross at his throat, jumped out of the car as it stopped by the survivors. A hard veteran at twenty-five, the captain thought he had seen everything in three years on the Eastern Front. But he had to admit he had never seen the leader of the Third Reich, or whatever they were calling Germany in the last week, fall out of a shot-up aircraft. He barely had time to salute before Rommel jumped into his jeep, ordered Gehlen to follow, and said. “Hauptmann, where are the closest Russians?”
The story would shoot across the fluid front in hours. Rommel had escaped death by an eyelash, and his only thought was to find some Russians to thrash. The fact that he arrived at the 20th Panzer Division and led its pitiful remnant into a counterattack that savaged the Russian tank corps spearheading the pursuit quickly became a legend that grew with the retelling. The truth was more modest. Both the Panzer division and the tank corps were shells of themselves and exhausted, but the magic of Rommel’s name worked wonders with the German troops. He seemed to be everywhere among the retreating columns, showing himself and turning them east. Goebbels might have been dead, but his propaganda machine was still working, and picked up the story of the victory at Baronovichi. In these hands it became another miracle. The Desert Fox had brought his magic with him to the Eastern Front.
If Field Marshal Walther Model, commander of the remnants of Army Group Center, had any complaint with the head of state interfering with his conduct of the retreat, he kept it to himself. After all, he had worked with Hitler, who only caused him trouble. If Rommel wanted to play division commander, he would not object, especially when it helped. Their meeting went surprisingly well. Rommel showed a good grasp of the situation and concurred with Model’s overall handling of the retreat and then outlined his plans for the immediate future. Within those plans, Model had a free hand. “Trade space for time. Save as many men and as much equipment as you can. The decisive battle will be fought on the Vistula-Narew line. But you must buy me the time to prepare for it and mass a Panzer reserve.” Then he was gone.
Zhukov at the Front
Zhukov did not allow himself to become elated when signal intercepts reported that Rommel had been shot down approaching the front. First reports were usually wrong, and he had more important things at hand, such as bullying his flagging armored forces forward. He was a much feared man, and with good reason. He was completely ruthless. Rumors had it that he had personally shot more than one general who failed. Only recently, disgusted with the failure of an attempted river crossing, Zhukov had ordered the corps and division commanders involved sent to penal battalions. His staff had intervened to save the corps commander. The former division commander was allowed to redeem himself by leading a suicide attack. Generals physically feared him, but the troops seemed to have a great confidence and affection for him. Though he spent their lives like a spendthrift, he had a reputation for fair treatment of the lower ranks. Anyone who shoots generals usually looks good to privates.
Zhukov did allow himself some guarded optimism, though. Operation Bagration had destroyed or wrecked four German armies. Stalin would be pleased with the 50,000 POWs who were destined to be marched through Red Square. His job now was to guarantee the destruction of the remnants. With luck the Red Army would crush them and throw itself over the Vistula and Narew Rivers before his forces completely outran their logistics. Then a few months’ rest and the offensive would resume, across the flat, tilled Polish plain, as its right brushed the Baltic through East Prussia and its left the Carpathian Mountains. The blow would fall upon broken German forces and sweep them aside as the Red Army made its lunge across the Oder to Berlin itself. And after Berlin there was the Rhine, and beyond the Rhine …
Remagen Bridge, July 15
The railroad control officer was a retread from the 1914-18 war. Strangely enough, he had been working the same Rhine River railroad bridge control point in late November and December 1918. The troop trains then had been full of German troops returning to the Fatherland. This time there was a difference. This time they were the victors, not the defeated.
The officer, like millions of other Germans, had been euphoric over the victory in the West. The news of Hitler’s death had followed and stunned the nation. But the armistice in the West followed so quickly that it submerged Hitler’s sudden disappearance from the stage in a wave of euphoria. Since Stalingrad and the disaster in Tunisia, the news had been getting worse. A sense of doom had formed in the minds of the German people, growing daily as the propaganda could no longer explain away the constant retreats and the rain of death from the sky increased. The destruction of Hamburg in its firestorm from hell stunned the elites, although everything possible had been done to hide the extent of the disaster from the public. Now the skies were clear again, and he, as a railroad control officer, found his job infinitely easier. No more constant interruptions of the schedule by damaged and destroyed track and rolling stock. It was almost like peacetime.
The army had moved quickly and almost instinctively to shed the obnoxious attributes of National Socialism. The up and coming “National Socialist” politicals quickly found themselves transferred to the more dangerous assignments, where their previous and enthusiastic support of Hitler’s “hold or die” orders took on new meaning. Himmler’s death left the SS without a head. One of Rommel’s first acts was to abolish its national establishment and subordinate its fighting arm directly into the army. SS Gen. Sepp Dietrich’s quiet support in the days before and after Hitler’s assassination had proved vital in getting the SS under control. Most Germans were too concentrated on the implacable Bolshevik enemy to have any taste for civil war. As the fantastic days of early July sped by, the German people clung to obedience and duty.
The railroad officer also had to admit that the sudden disappearance of all those swastikas and the return of the old imperial colors was a welcome change. He also gathered from the movement orders that his little operation was only part of an incredible shift of forces across Europe, dwarfing the transfer of over a million German troops from the Eastern Front in 1917 after the defeat of Czarist Russia. He was right. The movements truly dwarfed 1917 in scope and speed. At the beginning of June, German ground forces were stretched far too thin along a great circle. Hitler’s conquests in every direction had left him with an immense area to garrison, as shown by the table below. Everything was important to Hitler, who thereby dissipated the fighting strength of Germany in every direction. The consequences of a two-front war were devouring the substance of Germany’s ability to continue fighting at an alarming rate.
German Ground Forces, June 1, 19449
Eastern Front Finland Norway/Denmark West Italy Balkans
Army 149 6 15 47 23 18
Luftwaffe — — — 3 3 —
SS 8 1 — 4 1 7
Totals 157 7 15 54 27 25
The commitment to build up the West to counter the Allied invasion had sucked fighting forces from the Eastern Front, which by June stood at only 2,160,000 men, barely two-thirds of the force with which Hitler had launched Operation Barba
rossa in 1941. The total Wehrmacht forces in France at the same time were almost 1.4 mllion, of which 900,000 were in the field formations of the army and SS. Another 340,000 were in the Luftwaffe, of which over 30,000 were in its field divisions and paratrooper units and 100,000 were flak troops. The remainder were naval personnel.10
Theoretically, the Germans now had an additional 121 divisions available for commitment to the Eastern Front, almost doubling their order of battle. That included 1,030,000 men from France and the Low Countries, 500,000 from Italy, 300,000 from Scandinavia, and 500,000 from the Balkans,11 altogether 2.33 million. Practically, it would not be quite as impressive. At least half of these divisions were not first-class units, nor were they fully equipped or trained.
Zhukov’s appraisal of the German strength that would flow to the Eastern Front was exaggerated, but in truth it was still massive enough to give Germany a fighting chance. For any Germans and Russians, though, the parallels to 1917-18 were unsettling. The Germans had freed themselves of a two-front war in 1917 when the new Bolshevik government in Russia made a craven peace. The massive transfer of German forces to the Western Front had still not been enough to win the war, even in the last desperate gamble of the Ludendorff Offensives of 1918. Would history repeat itself in 1944-45?
A few of the more perceptive would argue that the last war’s analogy had broken down. In 1918 the flow of U.S. reinforcements to the Western Allies negated the new German strength transferred from the Eastern Front. In this war, the Soviets would have no reinforcement beyond what they already had—and the ongoing flood of Lend-Lease equipment and supplies. Still, it would be a race. If the Germans were to receive a vital reinforcement, it would be in a context not of a stalemated front in 1917-18, but of a crumbling front already reeling back from crushing Soviet blows. Hitler’s “hold or die” orders had already sacrificed huge numbers of German troops and infected the rest with an encirclement syndrome that corroded them with fear and panic. Even where troops had escaped, the retreat orders had often come too late. Vast amounts of supplies and irreplaceable heavy equipment in the army’s tail had been abandoned.
Sorting It Out
Rommel faced twin problems of incredible magnitude at the same time. He had to allocate and manage the flow of men and equipment east while at the same time staving off collapse of the Eastern Front. His first conclusion was that he could not do it all himself. He bypassed the senior officers of the army and appointed Speidel as chief of a combined staff of OKW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht) and OKH (Oberkommando des Heeres). By doing so he put an end to the absurd division of power by which the OKH ran the Eastern Front and the OKW ran everything else. Speidel and he had worked hand in glove together in Normandy, and Rommel felt he needed someone he could trust and with deep experience of operations. Speidel was that man. If Rommel was the intelligent man of action, Speidel was the military intellectual of great operational and administrative ability. As chief of staff of the 18th Army in 1940, Lt. Col. Speidel had received the surrender of Paris. He served two years on the Eastern Front as an army chief of staff in von Manstein’s Army Group South. When Rommel assumed command of Army Group B in France in early 1944, he asked for Speidel, even though they had never met, because the army grapevine had carried only good things about his fellow Württemberger. More than a few observers commented that their relationship was similar to the “happy marriage” between Hindenburg and Ludendorff in the 1914-18 War.
If Rommel stopped to think about it, he would have concluded that the situation facing him would break down any man. His enormous self-confidence and energy had to come to grips with his equally powerful realism. For the first time, Erwin Rommel had to take account of his own limitations. To this point in his life his talents and experiences had served him well at every level of command. But each step had been a military one, and a largely operational one. The realms of politics, diplomacy, and national strategy had never been his concern or of much interest. Nor did he have General Staff training or higher education to fall back on. What he did have was good judgment and a talent for picking good subordinates and trusting them. Speidel was one. And now there would be many others.
A flurry of orders recalled to active duty a number of the brilliant army officers forcibly retired by Hitler—Field Marshals Erich von Manstein and Wilhelm von List, Gen. Hermann Hoth, and many others. A similar flurry went out relieving the officers whose primary qualification had been loyalty to Hitler. Adolf Galland was jumped up from General of the Fighters to command of the Luftwaffe,12 but the Kriegsmarine was left in the capable hands of Grossadmiral Karl Dönitz. The competent fence-sitters and trimmers were retained. Generaloberst Heinz Guderian kept his position of Inspector General of Armored Forces. No one could reorganize and train the depleted Panzer arm better than he—especially now that he had something to work with. Albert Speer was also confirmed in office and given even more authority over Germany’s war production as the last of the party and service satrapies were abolished.
Rommel quickly realized that as a grand strategist, he was clearly outclassed by Stalin. An instinctive tactician and leader at heart, he now found himself thrust into the role of Hindenburg as supreme leader of the nation in war. And Hindenburg had failed. Also unlike Stalin, whose command and staff team had stabilized at a high level of efficiency, the German counterpart was in shambles. Hitler had purged it of men of character and filled it with sycophants and party loyalists. The anti-Hitler plotters had begun to squabble among themselves. Not only did Rommel need to get a grip on a war effort in free fall, but he had to suppress the Nazis and form a government as well. Then there had been Dachau and the horrific briefings on how deep the cancer ran. That filthy mess would have to be concealed while the fighting was still going on.13 The courts-martial would continue, but the German people would hear nothing. All in all, he would rather be back in the Western Desert, crawling up to an outpost line under fire to get a feel for the battle against his old, chivalrous British adversary.
Digging In
Stalin was a realist. Soviet logistics played out sooner than expected by the middle of July, and even the mass of American trucks could not be everywhere at once. And the Germans had not cooperated. Since Stalingrad, he had become used to Hitler’s assistance to the Red Army. It had been all too easy to demolish German units that had been nailed to the ground by a Führer order. Now the rules seemed to have changed. The Germans eluded the grasp of his marshals everywhere, striking where they could and moving ever west, holding ground only to allow others to escape. Soviet military intelligence, the GRU, informed him that captures had fallen off dramatically since the initial encirclement of Army Group Center. But now the Germans had finally come to a halt and turned about on a front on the line Kaunas-Grodno-Brest-Lvov.
Army Group North had begun an immediate evacuation of the Baltics. German troops and hordes of refugees were flooding through into East Prussia and western Lithuania and being evacuated by sea from Courland. The sudden appearance of the Kriegsmarine in strength in the Baltic had beaten the Soviet Baltic fleet back into its bolthole in Leningrad and protected what the Germans had the black humor to call unsere kleine Dunkirk (“our little Dunkirk”). Although Soviet armies had fallen upon the retreating Germans, they were unable to halt the evacuation and had in turn been stung by German counterattacks. In a surprise move, the Germans had informed the Finns of their intention to evacuate the 20th Mountain Army from northern Finland. The Finns immediately began negotiations with the Soviets. Stalin would drive a hard bargain, and transfer his forces where they would be more useful.14
Stalin hoped the Germans would make the mistake of abandoning the Romanians as they had the Finns, but they had not. There was a different logic at work. In the north, Army Group North and 20th Mountain Army had extended the front enormously with no strategic gain. Army Group South (formerly Army Group South Ukraine), however, served very useful purposes. To have withdrawn from Romania would have opened the door for Soviet armies to floo
d through the Balkans and threaten the Germans on an enormous and porous front. By holding the line along the Dniester River, the Germans could anchor one flank on the Black Sea and the other on the Carpathian Mountains. Already, strong forces evacuated from Italy and the Balkans were heavily reinforcing Army Group South.
Intelligence reports were also painting a picture of massive German reinforcement and reorganization deep behind the front in Poland. Air reconnaissance was becoming especially difficult as Luftwaffe strength ballooned. Red Air Force bombing missions had suddenly become very expensive and had to be curtailed.
Along the entire front, German strength swelled. And the Germans dug. Belt after belt of antitank defenses echeloned in successive lines from in front of and behind the Vistula-Narew line to the west halfway across Poland. In front of Army Group Center the front ran on a Bialystok-Brest-Lvov line. Von Manstein personally chose its name, the “Loki Line.”15 Another, stronger line, the Scharnhorst Line, was begun thirty to forty miles east of the Vistula and Narew Rivers. A third belt, the Gneisenau Line, ran along the western banks of those rivers. Amazing results were achieved in two short months as every available German and most of the adult Polish population were put to work with spade, shovel, and bucket. Antitank weapons, still caked with French mud or Norwegian bracken, were sewn thickly to great depth, while all Panzer divisions disappeared from the front. New production flowed into the gashes of fresh earth. The growing defenses presented a deadly thicket of antitank weapons, machine guns, antitank ditches and obstacles, and mines—interlocking defenses in depth. Large armor concentrations were also growing in East Prussia, to the west of Warsaw, and elsewhere.